SONG OF THE DAY: Learned From Texas

Saw last week that they’re making a DJ Screw tv show on some tv channel which won’t mean tv as much as streaming, and I was briefly excited but then thought about how weird that is to even care that they make a tv show about something you enjoy that’s not television at all. American culture is so weirdly channeled right now into these forms of digital consumption, where you don’t even end up with anything physical you can access again without trusting wherever you streamed it to have it still the next time you go to access it. And it doesn’t actually look like the people who make the shit actually get paid better for it. It seems to me the lesson of DJ Screw would not be for me to be excited about some dumbass semi-fictional biopic series like the Wu-Tang saga, which I watched finally and wanted to hate because I’m a natural contrarian, but actually enjoyed more than I expected, likely because I’m old and Wu-Tang is pop culture and consuming major pop culture about the things from earlier in our lives validates our earlier excitement in life, all while contributing to our current supplication and lethargy. But fuck man, DJ Screw literally got paid by making bootleg mixtapes and selling them out of his house like they were drugs, all of it off the books. He built an empire, so to speak, outside the mainstream, proudly so, and helped build a whole culture around that, not to mention the influence he had on all of music. It’s weird to me how the inspiration of people like that somehow gets filtered into programming that we all look at, but don’t have any actual inspiration to do anything. We just look at it and go, “Wow, that’s amazing,” and wait for the next thing to distract us. Anyways, my birthday is coming up in a couple weeks, so I’m looking forward to all my friends kicking a 37-minute freestyle over top the instrumental to Hard 2 Obtain’s “L.I. Groove” slowed down to 69 bpm.